Against innocence

The political response to the murder of Troy Davis does not challenge the assumption that communities need to clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the claim that davis is not one of those feared criminals, but an innocent Black man. Innocence, however, is just code for nonthreatening to white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other Black men-the bad ones-and the legal system is diagnosed as being infected with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is constituent mechanism through which racial violence is carried out.